Good Rockin' Tonight

The year Elvis died was a strange year, and I remember it not only because of what happened to my brother, Bubba, but because that was the year we had our first transsexual here in north Texas. Bobby Joe Pitts, who worked for Builders' Supply, told the wife and kids he still loved them, but he couldn't stand it any longer: He'd always felt like a woman in a man's body and wanted to go to Houston for a sex-change operation.

He'd been saving money for years in a secret account and was all ready to go through with it. But the doctor in Houston was cautious. He told Bobby Joe he should try wearing women's clothes for six months before the operation, since there would be no going back. So Bobby Joe came to our church, First Methodist, looking something like Mary Tyler Moore. His family took it hard. The preacher suggested, after the services, that he go to the Unitarian Church instead, where they took homosexuals and drug addicts. Bobby Joe stormed out, saying we were hypocrites and had no spirit of Christian love.

The first nice day rolled around, he was out at Skyline Country Club, just like every other year, for his 18 holes of Saturday-morning golf. Harley Otis told me when I walked into the locker room. Said Bobby Joe expected to play in the club tournament, but against the women. Harley was disgusted. "I guess it had to happen here," he said, snorting and throwing his shoes all the way across the room, where they hit the big picture of Arnold Palmer on the locker-room wall.

I felt sorry for Bobby Joe and went out to where he was teeing off alone. He said he was no different from that doctor who became a lady tennis pro. "They're just threatened," he said primly. About that time, Harley drove past in his electric cart and shouted out, asking Bobby Joe if he was for the E.R.A. Bobby Joe shot him the finger.

That night, I sat on my patio, drinking Jack Daniel's and looking up at the stars. Through the sliding glass doors, I could see my wife watching her favorite program. Hell, I could see Bobby Joe's point of view. I might like being a woman myself if I looked like Mary Tyler Moore. Trouble was, I wouldn't; and neither would Bobby Joe. I doubted any amount of plastic surgery could do the trick. My wife, alone there in the den, laughed at something on television, and I felt like a ghost. I decided the world was changing so fast nobody could keep up with it.

I'm a doctor myself, obstetrics and gynecology, and I've got a little office across the street from the hospital. Who should come see me the next day but my old high school sweetheart, Nadine MacAfee, whom I'd seen no more than two or three times in all the years since graduation. But my heart still stopped when I saw her there in the reception room.

In my office, she told me she'd like to get off the pill and try some other form of contraception. She dropped hints about her loneliness and talked nostalgically about the days when we'd gone steady; and I soon realized she was looking for romance. I was so nervous I thought I was going to stammer for the first time in years, and resorted to a trick the speech therapist had taught me: flipping my pencil up and catching it, not thinking too much about what I was saying.

"Look, Nadine," I said finally, "if it's all the same, I'd rather not examine you. But I can recommend another doctor."

"That's all right, Ross," she said. "I understand."

She had once been so shy, and this was a pretty bold thing for her to do. But I had never gone all the way with Nadine in high school and I wasn't about to now. I wanted to keep her the way she was in my memory--full of innocence and mystery. So I took out the bottle I keep in my desk drawer, we had a drink and I got her talking about her kids, my pencil flipping just like old Johnny Carson's.

When I showed her out, my brother, Bubba, who was a big wheel with the Prudential Insurance Company, was sitting in the reception room with a long face on. When I asked him what was wrong, he told me Elvis had died and we had to celebrate his passing away. "The King is gone," he said, "and nobody will ever replace him." I sent the rest of my patients home.

I hadn't known Elvis was so important to my brother, but then, I really didn't know Bubba anymore. We played golf now and then, but our wives hated each other, which seems to be the rule, not the exception; so we never saw each other socially, not at all.

We drove out to a bar in the new shopping mall, where neither of us had ever been. Thank God It's Friday's it was called, and I think it was supposed to look like Greenwich Village.

"What the hell has happened here?" my brother said.

"How do you mean, Bubba?"

"What's happened to this town? Why is everyone pretending they're in New York City?"

"I don't know, Bubba; I guess it's television."

To me, the whole shopping mall was a depressing place. Nobody had been able to rest until we got one, just like every other town. There must have been a thousand editorials in the paper about it. On the way in, we'd passed droves of sad-looking teenagers hanging out around the fountain, and I'd thought how much happier we looked out at the Pioneer Drive-In, in our cars. But everyone was proud of the mall as they could be, and who was wrong, them or me?

Harley Otis was there, right in the thick of it, wearing polyester pants, white loafers with gold chains, a leather jacket and a Dacron shirt with the collar spread out on his shoulders. There was also a little gold chain around his neck.

"Who you tryin' to look like, Harley?" my brother asked. "The Six Million Dollar Man?"

Harley took it as a compliment and started telling us how he'd just gotten back from a Successful Life course in Dallas where he'd learned the importance of a Positive Mental Attitude. "You've got to set goals for yourself," he said.

"What's your goal, Harley?"

"Right now, I'm buckin' for president of Kiwanis. But my immediate goal is to get into Tina Eubank's pants."

I looked over and there was Tina, twice divorced, standing by the jukebox. It didn't look like he'd have too much trouble. "Y'all have a nice day," Harley said, and slid toward her.

Then we drove out the Fort Worth Highway, my brother talking about everything he hated, from women's lib to People magazine. I hadn't seen him like this for years. There had been a time, when I was in med school and my brother driving a truck, when he developed all sorts of theories about why this country was going to pieces. He also claimed to have seen UFOs and talked to them on his C.B. I finally diagnosed the problem when I discovered he was taking "L.A. turnarounds"--those biphetamine capsules truckers use on long hauls. Once he started working for the Prudential, he settled down and that side of him disappeared.

But now he was driving too fast and talking crazy, like he used to; looking around at everything and not liking what he saw. Just then, I heard a siren and saw flashing blue lights and a highway-patrol car pulled us over.

It was Floyd Beer, whom I hadn't seen in maybe 15 years. "Could I see your operator's license?" he asked, all business, holding his metal clip board.

"It's Bubba Moody, Floyd."

"You were exceeding a posted speed limit of fifty-five miles per hour, and it looks to me like you got alcoholic beverages in the car."

"Floyd, don't you remember? We took shop together?"

"Yeah, I remember. But shitfire, Bubba, you were driving like a bat."

"Floyd, Elvis died today."

"I heard."

"My brother and I are drinking to his memory. Don't give me the cold shoulder, Floyd. Have a drink with us and let's remember all the good and bad old days."

"Well, I do get off duty in half an hour," Floyd said, looking across the car at me and grinning. "That really you, Ross?"

•

Then the three of us went out to the old colored man's place. It was my brother's idea. You could have knocked me over with a stick when I saw it was still there, the little red-brick building with the sign that said, hot pit cooked bar-b-que.

The old colored man himself, who was coffee-colored and had a pencil mustache (Fats Domino, we had called him), opened the counterweighted lid of the stove. Inside was at least a chine of beef. He cut off slabs and put them on bread. Then he added half a green onion and a wedge of longhorn cheese and wrapped it all in butcher paper.

We carried out sandwiches to a table and the other customers, all colored (black, I corrected myself), sort of looked at us without looking at us, for Floyd still wore his highway-patrol uniform; then got up and left, dropping their trash in the garbage can on the way out.

"See, big brother?" Bubba said. "The past is still here, all around us."

I couldn't take my eyes off my sandwich. It sat there on the tabletop, which was bare except for a Louisiana Hot Sauce bottle full of toothpicks. Grease spotted the butcher paper. I took a bite and it ran down my chin. Lord, it was good.

Bubba returned from the cooler with three bottles of Royal Crown Cola, the old-style bottles with the yellow pyramids on them. "Look at that," he said softly, staring at his bottle. "Would you look at that?" Then he drank it.

"What are you up for, Floyd?" he said.

"My wife's going to be wondering where I am," Floyd said, and when Bubba gave him a sour look, added, "Shitfire, Bubba, there's a good program on tonight. About Vince Lombardi."

I nodded. "My wife's not home. Tonight's her yoga class. Y'all could come over and watch it." What was I saying y'all for? I hadn't said y'all in years.

"What's so important about Vince Lombardi?" Bubba said. "You never knew him. A night like this comes once in a lifetime, and tonight the three of us are going to the Cotton Bowling Palace."

So we drove on down to the long, low building on Holiday Creek, full of the odor of paste wax and the thunder of balls; and the same people were there who had always been there, roughnecks and refinery workers and railroad brakemen. I was clumsy at first, dropping the ball on the lane with a thud; but Bubba was greasing them in right off. We didn't bother to keep score. None of us could remember how. We just bowled, and I relaxed, for by now the evening was lost, anyway, watching Bubba cut up, bowling like Don Carter, and so forth. He could always impersonate anyone he wanted. Mom said his version of me was deadly. When he came over and dropped down beside me in one of the green-plastic chairs, I felt a stab of brotherhood and socked him on the arm, the way I would have in the old days.

"Hey, Bubba," I said. "You old son of a bitch."

"You're not sorry you're not home watching the life of old Vince Lombardi?"

"No, Bubba. I genuinely enjoyed this night."

"Life is a road."

"Yes, Bubba. Life is a road." I waited for him to finish, so drunk the bowling balls sounded like they were rolling through my head.

"Once I thought I knew who I was and where I was going. I could see the road ahead. But I lost my way."

Floyd was out on the lane, yelling. A pin had fallen outside the gate, and when nobody appeared to help, he walked up the lane, slipping and falling down, and got it himself. People were laughing at him.

"There was only one person of our time who never stopped. Who became the person he dreamed of becoming."

"Who's that?"

"Elvis," my brother said.

Do you know what he did then? He stepped up to the booth where you got your shoes and where they called your number when your lane was ready. He grabbed the microphone away from the fat lady who was sitting there and sang Love Me Tender to her. It started as a joke, but this was the day Elvis had died, and when he finished, the place was dead quiet. Then everyone applauded and started shouting, "More, more," and I was shouting, too. And he did sound exactly like Elvis, although I never thought he looked like him at all. I thought he looked more like Conway Twitty.

•

One year later to the day, I was riding down highway 281 in a white Cadillac Eldorado. The oil-well pumping jacks nodded in the fields, the blacktop shimmered in the heat, and in the front seat was my brother Bubba, wearing a white jump suit with silver studs, his hair dyed black. The sign on the side of the car read:

El tex asBubba Moody King of rock and rollNorth texas' own Elvis

Floyd Beer was driving, wearing Las Vegas shades and the Robert Hall suit Bubba had bought him at the Hub Clothing Store.

Bubba had done better than I would have believed, perfecting his act at Kiwanis and Rotary dances. He'd also done benefits for the crippled and retarded children, which people liked, and borrowed enough money to lease this Eldorado just like the one Elvis had. Now we were on our way to the first stop on Bubba's summer tour, which was to end at Six Flags Over Texas. There was to be a convention of Elvis Presley impersonators and Bubba intended to prove he was the best in the world.

"This is the life, isn't it?" he said, looking back at me and grinning. "Man, sometimes I feel so good I've got to go out and take a walk through K mart to bring myself down."

We stopped at the Cow Lot in Nocona, where Bubba bought a pair of ostrich-hide boots and gave the owner an 8 & 10 autographed glossy photo, which he thumbtacked on the wall next to the photos of Willie Nelson, Arthur Godfrey, Howard Hughes and all the other celebrities who, down through the years, had bought Nocona boots.

When we got back in the car, Bubba said, "Floyd, I think I'm going to ask you to dye your hair red so I can call you Red West." That was Elvis' bodyguard. Bubba really wanted to make the act authentic.

We came to a billboard that said we were eight miles from Decatur, home of Dico Sausage, and showed a pair of rolling dice. "Pull over, Floyd," Bubba said.

He struck a karate pose in front of the billboard and Floyd took his picture with the Polaroid Swinger. I was getting back in the car when I heard a buzz just like an electric alarm clock going off.

"Christ, Bubba, what the hell you doing?" Floyd said. Bubba had picked up a baby rattlesnake out of the ditch and was making like he was going to kiss it, holding it inches away from his lips.

"Get a picture, get a picture," he shouted, laughing like an idiot.

We drove on through more north Texas and finally into Decatur, where a banner across the street proclaimed Bubba's show. "The King is here," my brother said.

Floyd parked and we walked into the high school, across the street from the red-granite courthouse. The band was already setting up. Down in the dressing room, Bubba put on his make-up and I sat on a box of textbooks in the corner and watched. Already you could hear people filling the auditorium upstairs. "Sounds like a good crowd," Bubba said, gluing on his fake sideburns.

Then a local disc jockey appeared with a tape recorder and Miss Billie Tucker, president of Bubba's north Texas fan club. She'd brought along a list she'd compiled of characteristics Bubba and Elvis had in common. The disc jockey held up his microphone and she read it, perspiration on her upper lip.

"Both Elvis and Bubba are Capricorns," she said. "Both were truck drivers, both stationed with the Army in Germany, and both were devoted to their mothers. Both are overweight, both like Cadillac Eldorados and both like to stay up all night. Both have fantastic sex appeal...."

Good Lord, I thought. These people are serious.

Upstairs, I found myself in an ordinary high school auditorium. There were flags of the United States and Texas on either side of the stage. The ceiling was high, yellowish globes shedding down a dim light. Probably the Pledge of (continued on page 144)Good Rockin' Tonight(continued from page 112) Allegiance had been said here thousands of times. Tonight, it was full of more middle-aged women than I'd ever seen in one place, and the clicking of high heels and pocketbooks was a constant roar.

Then the house lights went down and it got dead silent. The curtain rose in the darkness and a spotlight stabbed down and my brother leaped into it. He tore into Heartbreak Hotel like a man possessed. My brother, who had been good, had gotten better. Maybe he really was the best. He had all the moves down, and from this distance, it made no difference at all that he wasn't a carbon copy of Elvis.

He sang Blue Suede Shoes and Don't Be Cruel and Jailhouse Rock and spoke of the series of miracles that had brought Elvis to the top in so short a time. He said Elvis had loved black music and made a plea for integration and sang In the Ghetto. All this time, he was throwing scarves into the audience and women were fighting for them. Then he said, "There's been a great loss of faith in this country. Maybe it was Nixon, maybe Vietnam. I voted for Nixon, but he betrayed us. He thought he could get away with fooling us rednecks." He looked around, his face incandescent in the spotlight. "That's right. I'm a redneck. So are you. And so was Elvis. We're the people who kept the faith."

There was more, but I don't really remember all he said; and he didn't write it down, he spoke right from the heart. He asked for a moment of silence for the boys who had died in Vietnam and sang How Great Thou Art. Then he ripped right into Hound Dog and disappeared without an encore. The lights came up and we were back in that shabby little auditorium with flags on either side of the stage.

The audience went wild, like they'd just woke up, and I ran downstairs to Bubba's dressing room, where you could hear them stomping on the floor overhead.

Then Floyd said, "Here come the autograph hounds," and opened the door and they poured in. Bubba signed his own glossies as fast as they could shove them at him, and pretty soon a woman grabbed his gold chain and tore it right off his neck.

"We'd better get out of here, Bubba," Floyd said, and we shoved through the crowd. But they had our way blocked and we had to detour into the girls' rest room. Bubba was still laughing, but to tell the truth, I was scared. We climbed out the window and ran across the parking lot, where someone from the band was waiting in the Eldorado. We all piled in and drove off, a crowd of women following us all the way to the corner.

"They shoulda had cops there," Bubba said after a while. "I told them we'd need cops. Floyd, you'd better start packing a rod. You're gonna need it if there's any more crowd scenes like this."

•

At Six Flags, Bubba demolished the other Elvis impersonators. What surprised me was how many there were. They came in all shapes and sizes, and one had come from as far away as Nebraska. There was only one who was serious competition: Claude Thibodeaux, from New Iberia, Louisiana, who billed himself as the Cajun Elvis. He had flash, but nobody could beat Bubba for sheer impact.

Right after his performance, Bubba was approached by someone who wanted to manage him. Elvis Presley's manager, as everyone knows, was Colonel Tom Parker. This was Bud Parker, late a colonel in the U.S. Air Force. The coincidence tickled them both. He promised Bubba in one year he'd be playing Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.

I was packing my suitcase when Bubba came into my room and said, "Big brother, you and me are going to Houston."

"What for?"

"Looka here at this telegram."

The telegram was from Nancy Jo Miller, who'd been Bubba's high school love. She was married now and lived in Houston. She said she'd read about his act, congratulated him and hoped they could get together sometime.

Sometimes my brother dumfounded me. But I couldn't say no, and anyway, he was paying for the tickets. So instead of going home, we flew to Houston on Trans Texas, got a rented car and a room at the Holiday Inn.

Nancy Jo lived in a $200,000 brick colonial on the edge of Houston, with pine trees growing in the front yard. Bubba had this idea he wanted to drop in and surprise her, so we didn't phone ahead. He slipped on his shades and I rang the doorbell. I felt sorry for Bubba: He was as nervous as a kid on his first date.

Just for a moment, I saw Nancy Jo as she really was, a little faded around the eyes and mouth. But the years had been good to her. I suppose you could say she resembled Angie Dickinson--which, in a way, was a hell of a lot better than she'd looked in high school.

"Oh, my Lord," she said, when she saw Bubba in his white Elvis jump suit, and gave a short, embarrassed laugh that was cut off as if by a knife. Then she said, "I'll make y'all bloody marys," and disappeared into the kitchen.

"This was a mistake," Bubba said. He was trembling so hard I had to hold him up.

Nancy Jo came back and we sat in the tiny front room with the big picture window, which I knew was almost never used except for guests. What with the baby grand piano and the big sofa and the glass-topped coffee table, there was hardly room for the three of us; but from the first, I don't even think they knew I was there. They were totally absorbed in each other. She poured out the story of all that had happened since they'd seen each other last, and I stared at the celery stalk in my bloody mary and tried not to listen.

Nancy Jo had intended to marry Bubba, but he had to do his Army service, and there seemed to be all the time in the world; so she went to Dallas and enrolled in stewardess school. She pictured herself wearing that cute uniform and doing favors for the passengers, bringing them pillows and playing with their kids.

She lived with some other stews on Gaston Avenue and there were some pretty wild parties; but Nancy Jo locked herself in her room and did crossword puzzles and wrote love letters to Bubba.

It was the airplane that did her in. The other stews hung out in the galley, where you could meet pro-football players and rich oilmen. Nancy Jo didn't want a rich oilman: She was going to have Bubba. So she fought it.

But the airplane was the most boring place in the world. The kids were snotty and their parents were cross and didn't appreciate the favors you did for them. There was nothing to do but look out the window, and when you did, what did you see? Clouds.

In the end, she went to the galley, which was like a nickel-plated singles bar, so tiny you couldn't turn around without bumping into some horny guy. There she met Calvin Sloate, a corporate lawyer for Texaco; and they drank Scotch out of tiny bottles while the galley roared like a sea shell, rocking slightly in the rough air 20,000 feet over Indianapolis.

"I'm sorry, Bubba," she said. "But you were going to be in the Army for another year and that seemed like forever. I had to get off that airplane." So she had (continued on page 189)Good Rockin' Tonight(continued from page 144) married Calvin, and now 17 years had flashed by like nothing at all.

"We've got a condo in Vero," she said, "and one in Aspen, and last year we went skiing at Sundance and Lisa had her picture taken with Robert Redford."

"Lisa?" Bubba asked in a flat voice.

"My daughter," she said, showing us another picture. "That's her with her Arabian stallion. She loves horses."

She showed us the rest of the house. We stood for a moment at the door of Calvin's study, like visitors at a museum looking into one of those rooms closed off with a velvet rope. Calvin had a collection of beer cans, one from every country in the world; a pair of expensive shotguns; and a lamp shade made of playboy centerfolds. I had already noticed his radar-equipped bass boat in the driveway.

In the bedroom, she slid back the closet door and showed us her $500 Italian shoes. Bubba just looked at her and said, "You know you broke my heart, don't you?"

"Oh, Bubba, don't say that. It sounds so horrible. And, anyway, how could I know you cared that much? Look here."

She took from under her costly shoes the old high school yearbook; and there, on the same page, were their pictures. Their faces were soft and unformed but shining with a sort of light. Bubba had a flattop with "fenders"--long on the sides and short on the top. Over his face he had written, in blue ballpoint pen: "Had a lot of good times with you and hope to see more of you next year. Bubba."

"Couldn't you have said more than that?" she asked, tears in her eyes. "How was I to know I was so important to you?"

"In those days," Bubba said, "you won the game of love by pretending you didn't care. Yeah, that's all we thought love was, a game. But it turned out to be a more serious game than we thought."

At this point, I left the room, phoned a cab and went back to the Holiday Inn. I don't think they missed me. It rained, and there I spent the rest of the afternoon watching Return to Earth, a TV movie about the life of an astronaut, and drinking Jack Daniel's. Later, Bubba came back. "Well, big brother," he said, "it's all settled. She's leaving her husband and I'm leaving my wife, and everything's going to be like it was." He'd been walking around in the rain and his clothes were soaked.

But I was skeptical that Bubba could so easily turn back the clock. Now that he'd become a star, he thought anything was possible. To me, he was like that astronaut who'd achieved his boyhood dream and went to the moon; but sooner or later, he had to come back down to earth and be an ordinary person like the rest of us. On the plane home, Bubba turned to me and said, "Big brother, I'm going to tell you something. You're the only one who'll understand."

"Yes, Bubba?"

"My whole life, I've felt like I was in the wrong body or something. But when I'm Elvis ... I got it right. I'm the person I should have been, the person I've always known I could be."

Now it struck me that this was what Bobby Joe Pitts, the would-be transsexual, had said. Like Bubba, he only felt like himself when he was somebody else.

"Do you know what I'm saying?" Bubba whispered, holding my shoulder in an iron grip.

Yes, I knew. At the best moments of my life--when I hit a good golf shot or had a woman I adored--I felt like someone else. A version of me, maybe, but a version that was to Ross Moody what a Cadillac Eldorado was to a Ford Pinto. I doubted you could totally become that perfect version of yourself. Bubba felt that way now, but he could not be El Tex As for the rest of his life.

But that was the happiest I ever saw Bubba. On this flight, we had, instead of a stewardess, a male flight attendant. Ordinarily, Bubba would have made some sarcastic comment; but on that day, he seemed at peace with himself. I slept most of the way, but once I woke up. Bubba, in the hollow roar of the cabin, was looking through the porthole and smiling down at the dark world below.

•

When he broke the news to his wife, Jan, she knew just how to take it: like Jill Clayburgh in that movie about the New York woman, nodding, her eyes closed, finishing his sentences for him.

"And so," he said, "I am going to----"

"Move out. All right, buster, go ahead. Do yourself a big favor."

They were standing in the den, and she poked through the big glass bowl on top of the television set full of matchbooks from every restaurant they'd ever been to.

"You'd just better get yourself a good lawyer," she told him.

The strange thing, he said, was that she seemed almost glad. Here it was, the crisis predicted so often. Now she would learn to think of herself and be happy (like Rhoda once she got rid of that slob, Joe), maybe even write a book. The possibilities were endless.

"There is one more thing," Bubba said. "Here is a list of our close friends whom I do not want you to sleep with, as they would be laughing at me behind my back."

"Thank you," she said. "I know just what to do with it."

She slept with the first one, Bubba's boss at the Prudential, that very night; and spent the rest of the week working her way down the list.

Nancy Jo also left Calvin Sloate but, on the advice of a girlfriend, went to a therapist, and the first thing he did was tell her not to make any more sudden moves.

She phoned Bubba and said, "I'm living in an apartment complex with plastic ivy on the walls. There's nobody here but kids; and my lawyer says I won't get any kind of settlement, since I moved out. Bubba, I'm having second thoughts."

So Bubba sped down to Houston, even though he was starting another tour in a few days. Nancy Jo wouldn't see him right away: She had to look through her appointment book and set a date. When they finally got together, all she would do was talk for hours. She had a whole new vocabulary and she wouldn't drink bloody marys anymore, just white wine and something called Amaretto, which Bubba said tasted like Log Cabin syrup.

She was changing, slipping away; but Bubba was desperate to prove he could accept her under any conditions. He went to see her therapist himself and even took her to a Woody Allen movie.

•

I didn't see Bubba for months. At the end of his tour, he phoned from Abilene and asked if I'd come down. I found him that night at the Cross Plains Motel, a real dump.

His appearance shocked me: He'd gained maybe 40 pounds. He said, "Did you bring your little black bag?"

"Yeah. What for?"

"You got any speed in it?"

I was offended and told him to forget it. He said it was hard for him to keep his weight down, being on the road and all and eating nothing but junk food. But I wouldn't be talked into it. Then I went right into the john and flushed all my pills down the toilet.

When I came back out, Bubba was talking to Floyd, who had his hair dyed red. I sat down and noticed my chair had a Rocking R brand on the arm. It was Roy Rogers furniture, probably bought for some kid 30 years ago, and it had ended up here in this terrible motel. For the first time, I glimpsed the sadness of being on the road singers talk about, and thought it was getting to Bubba.

Floyd said he had a girl for Bubba. "Tell her I'll meet her in one hour," Bubba said. "The usual conditions."

The conditions under which Bubba met his fans were these: They had to be between the ages of 35 and 45, they had to provide their own car and they had to park on a dirt road on the edge of town. When Bubba appeared in the Eldorado, they flashed their lights if it was safe. Then Bubba parked and came ahead on foot, bringing his own bottle.

I thought this was a foolish, adolescent thing to do, and told him so.

"You know, big brother," he said, "I feel sorry for you. You been fooling around with women's private parts for so long you've forgotten what they're for."

Like everything Bubba said, there was some truth to this. In my years as a gynecologist, I'd examined most of the girls I'd worshiped in high school, and it meant less than nothing to me. It made me wonder about my choice of profession.

"When are you playing Las Vegas?" I asked him.

"Colonel Parker says I'm not ready for Vegas. I need one more thing to put me over the top--plastic surgery, so I'm identical to Elvis. 'Course, there'll be no goin' back--but it's worth it if it gets me to Caesars Palace."

"No," I said. "No, Bubba. You can't do that."

"Why not?"

I couldn't exactly say, but I was thinking: If he loses his face, he loses himself.

"Bobby Joe Pitts decided not to," I said.

"Bobby Joe Pitts?"

"You know. The plastic surgeon told him he should try living like a woman. Well, he joined a women's group, and now he's changed his mind. He says he thought men were boring, but women have the most boring conversations in the world."

This got my brother furious. "Are you comparing me to some miserable little pervert? Christ, Bobby Joe ... why, he wore a brassiere under his football jersey the whole senior year. And we thought he was joking!"

"Will Nancy Jo love you if you don't have your own face?"

He took a pistol out of the desk drawer, a Colt Python, and spun it around his finger and said, "Nancy Jo doesn't know what she wants. Last time I talked to her, she said she wanted space. I said, 'Hell, you can have all the space you want, once we're married.' " He aimed the pistol at the television screen, where Elvis was singing to Ann-Margret. It was a reshowing of Viva Las Vegas on cable TV.

"His voice sorta went to pieces, didn't it?" Bubba said. "Frankly, I think I'm better now than he ever was."

"Bubba, put down that gun."

"Come on," he said. "I'm going to get some nooky."

So Floyd drove us out to the edge of town, where we parked on a dirt road and could see ahead, dimly, the outline of another car.

"She's not flashing her lights," Floyd said. "It must not be safe yet."

I rolled down the window. There was a full moon that night and I thought I could hear the distant yip of coyotes.

When I mentioned it, Floyd said, "Ain't no more coyotes in this county. Farmers wiped them out with traps and poisoned bait."

Still, I thought I could hear them, as I had on so many nights when we'd driven out on Red River Road.

"Do you have to do this, Bubba? What about Nancy Jo?"

"A man's got to get his satisfaction. And if you can't be near the one you love, love the one you're near."

The headlights of the other car flashed.

Bubba opened the door.

"Don't go, Bubba."

"You know, big brother," he said, "you ought to come with me. It would do you good to see how those ladies give me all that good X-rated sex they been holding out on their husbands all these years." He came around and opened my door. "Just stand outside and listen. She won't mind. Thrill to the days of yesteryear, big brother. Come along with me and I'll show you how good that low-rent lovin' can still be."

And, God help me, I did. My heart was pounding, but I stepped out of the car and followed my brother down that road in the moonlight.

"You know, Bubba, you are a devil. You have the damnedest way of getting people to do what you want."

"Don't I know it?"

"You were right about me being a gynecologist and all. Somehow, I lost interest in women. It just slipped away from me like everything else."

"The things closest to you go first," he said. "They slip away so softly you don't notice. You wake up one morning the stranger in a strange land."

"You're right," I said. "But women are ... everything."

"Yeah, verily, good buddy."

"Sex may be the secret of American life. In fact, I see now...."

But I don't know what I saw, for what happened next drove everything out of my head. The headlights of the car came on, blinding us, and we heard a male voice say, "Try to screw my wife, will you, you sons of bitches! I'll kill you!" Then a shotgun went off and I heard the shot rip through the air right over our heads. The car was rolling toward us and Bubba and I were running back down the road.

"The fence, big brother," Bubba shouted, "hit for the fence." And I dove under it, the barbed wire tearing the coat right off my back. Then we were stumbling through the prickly pear, the shotgun still going off and one pellet stinging the back of my neck like a yellow jacket.

Bubba grabbed me and threw me down. The car stopped and a spotlight probed around until it found us. Bubba leaped up, his fists balled, a foolhardy, magnificent sight. I thought: This is the end of your life, Ross.

Then we heard Floyd laughing and barking like a dog. "Come out, come out, wherever you are, Elvis."

It was all a big joke.

Bubba picked up a clod and threw it at the car, but Floyd only laughed harder. The band had been in on it--I could hear them laughing, too. My face was scratched and my palms were full of cactus thorns, and I could feel cold air on my back where my jacket had been ripped off.

Bubba climbed over the fence and threw himself at Floyd. They circled in the headlights, Bubba throwing wild punches and Floyd dodging them, shouting, "Shitfire and save matches, Bubba. Can't you take a joke?"

"Joke! We coulda been hurt running around in that goddamned cactus patch."

"Oh, hell, you're just pissed off 'cause we pulled that same trick on you in high school. I never thought you'd be stupid enough to fall for it twice."

That stopped Bubba. "All right," he said. "So I did. But this time it wasn't funny. We're grown men now, not high school kids."

Floyd kept laughing.

"All right, Floyd, you're fired. That's right. I'm giving you notice."

Somebody from the band stepped forward and said he thought Bubba was being too harsh, and Bubba fired him, too. He looked around and said, "Anybody else?"

Then everybody said it was fine with them; they were getting fed up with Bubba, anyway. There were some bitter words. It ended up with us going back to the motel and them going off to a honky-tonk to get drunk.

On the way back, Bubba began wondering where he was going to get another band. His troubles were multiplying and he said, "Maybe I should just shoot myself."

"Don't talk that way, Bubba."

At the motel, the television was still on, nothing showing on the screen now but snow. I went into the bathroom, threw my torn jacket in the trash can and started putting iodine on the scratches on my face. The shot lifted me right off the floor.

He was sitting on the bed, holding the pistol. The television was exploded, a bullet through the picture tube. "I always wanted to know how he felt when he did that," Bubba said. "Now I know."

•

Things went downhill fast after that. My brother never found another band. The bookings dried up and Colonel Parker lost interest. The IRS was now investigating Bubba's income taxes and, in the middle of it all, he got a Dear John letter from Nancy Jo saying she'd fallen in love with her psychiatrist.

He went down to Houston with the idea of confronting her but, instead, went to Calvin Sloate's house. Calvin himself answered the door and Bubba said, "I'm the son of a bitch who ran off with your wife."

"I know," Calvin said. "You're Bubba Moody. Come on in and let's let it all hang out."

Bubba, feeling numb all over, walked into Lisa's room. She was lying on her bed under a John Travolta poster.

"Your mother doesn't love me anymore," he said.

"I know. I think she's making a big mistake."

"You're the closest thing to her, the way she once was," Bubba said. "You're beautiful."

"Thanks, Bubba. I like your looks, too."

"Will you marry me?"

"Are you serious?"

"Dead serious," he said, and kissed her on her teenage lips.

When he turned around, Calvin was standing in the door.

•

Bubba phoned from Houston and said he'd been shot in the leg. It was nothing serious--Calvin had used a .22 target pistol. Before I left, I went over to tell Jan, who'd just gotten back from a trip to Las Vegas with Harley Otis. When I got there, she was gluing silver dollars to the top of the coffee table.

"Look here at all the money I won," she said. "Seems like my luck just won't quit."

When she heard about Bubba, she said, "That's his problem. All that's behind me now. I'm starting over."

She disappeared into the kitchen and I was left alone with the television. Tom Snyder was interviewing a judge in California who'd started divorcing 50 people in a group. There were no lawyers required, he just asked everyone if they had irreconcilable differences. When they said they did, he pronounced them divorced and they headed for the door. The men moved slowly, but the women were smiling and hopeful, and I thought how much better women seemed to adjust to modern life. "So would you say this is ... the coming thing?" Tom Snyder asked, and the judge said it was.

"Notice anything different?" she said, coming back into the room.

"No. Is your hair shorter?"

She told me she'd had silicone injections. "Come on, Ross, you know my breasts always drooped."

"No, Jan. I've never noticed."

She put down her glass of white wine and lay on the floor. "See? They're nice and hard. They're the same standing up or laying down. They're just like doorknobs."

"I honestly can't tell the difference, Jan."

She leaned so close I could feel her breath on my cheek. "Go ahead and put your hand on them. I don't mind. Feel the difference for yourself."

I excused myself and drove home, the whole side of my face burning like I'd stood too close to a hot stove.

•

So Bubba never got his plastic surgery or a trip to Las Vegas (although his wife did). He ended up driving a truck again, but to me he seemed happier, and I found I enjoyed knowing him more than I had since we were kids. He still, however, had his problems with the IRS, and one night, in the dead of that winter, he tapped on my patio doors. We sat outside, in the darkness, while my wife watched Family Feud. (She seemed to draw strength from that program: She never missed it.)

"The Government lawyers are coming Monday," Bubba said, "and I'm liable to do a couple of years in prison."

I told him I'd lend him money, but he said after the divorce he couldn't face going to court again.

"Let's take one last ride out Red River Road," he said, "in case I never see it again."

So we took a six-pack and drove out and parked on the edge of town, where the pumping jacks rose and fell in the fields on either side.

"You know," he said, "Elvis himself couldn't make it today. Everything today glorifies the loser, the person who can't help himself. Someone like me doesn't stand a chance. Yeah, it's the decade of the loser; and it's the losers who did me in. Come on, big brother, let's go ride those pumping jacks."

So we did. He could always talk me into anything. He sat on one end and I on the other, hanging on for dear life, and we rose and fell like two kids on a gigantic seesaw.

"Well, if that's the way this country's going to be," he shouted over the roar of the diesel, "they can have it. I want no part of it. I'll go right on, trying to do the impossible. Look, big brother," he said, reaching over his head as the pumping jack rose, "I can touch the moon."

Then he fell off. I thought he was dead. But he groaned and threw up in the weeds, and I cleaned him off as best I could.

"We'd better go home, Bubba," I said.

"He never died," Bubba said. "Not really."

"He did die, Bubba. Of a heart attack. We've all got to get older and die."

"No, big brother. I'll let you in on a secret. You and I are going to be the first people in history who don't."

•

The men from the IRS came on Monday, but Bubba was gone. Floyd, who was now back with the highway patrol, found his truck parked by the side of the road near Electra. There'd been lots of UFO sightings the night before. A farmer near Bowie found his cows dead, emptied out; nothing left of them but horns, hooves and hide, and not a drop of blood on the ground, either. The lights of Bubba's truck were still on, and his C.B. radio, the key turned to send. Floyd found one footprint in the sandy soil just the other side of the fence, apparently headed for a strange depression in the ground, where all the grass was dead. It made the front page of the papers, and the sermon that Sunday was "A Close Encounter with Your God."

•

Then things got more or less back to normal here in north Texas. Bobby Joe Pitts started a marriage-counseling service. He saw himself as someone who'd known the problem from both sides, a sort of Kissinger in the war between the sexes. Harley Otis got a divorce and married Jan, but it wasn't long before she showed up at Stolen Hours, a new bar for housewives where they could drink all afternoon, watch the soaps and perhaps have a casual affair. Floyd forgot his grudge against Bubba and we spent several nights talking about all that had happened. "I'll tell you one thing," he said. "Your brother was the most remarkable person ever born around here."

In October, I finally made love to Nadine MacAfee. But we both discovered that what we had looked forward to for so long took only moments to do, and, naturally, this was a disappointment. We parted friends, but it confirmed my idea that the past is a closed book: You don't tamper with it.

But that night I couldn't sleep, and long after they played the national anthem on television, and showed the airplane and the prayer, I was still pacing the floor and feeling like a ghost. Then the phone rang.

"Hello, big brother."

For a moment, I couldn't see or speak. "I just wanted to let you know," Bubba said, "that I was still on the planet Earth. In fact, I'm in Globe, Arizona."

"It's good to hear your voice, Bubba."

"It's good to hear yours. Hey, this is great country out here. Leaving that town was the best thing I ever did." He told me he was working as a disc jockey, but he had big plans: There was an old, abandoned drive-in out on the edge of town, and he was going to renovate it and call it Bubba's Fifties Burger.

"You know," he said. "Carhops on roller skates, neon lights and, on the jukebox, some of that great old rock 'n' roll."

"Better keep a low profile, Bubba. You're still a wanted man."

"Don't worry about that," he said. "The road's right out my back door. And if I have to split, well, that won't be so bad, either. If there's a prettier sight than an American blacktop road goin' nowhere in the moonlight, I don't know what it is."

There was a click, then nothing but echoes along 1000 miles of telephone cable.

Well, goddamn. I took three or four shots of Jack Daniel's and did a sort of dance out there on my patio, hopping around under the stars. Then I got in the car to go tell Floyd the good news: that the King was still with us.

"From a distance, it made no difference at all that he wasn't a carbon copy of Elvis."

"'She's leaving her husband and I'm leaving my wife, and everything's going to be like it was.'"